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Summary of Question:	Response To Indian Bipolar
Category:	Health
Date Posted:	Monday, 11/17/2003 8:26 PM MST

Sat Nam.

To the young lady who asked where all the Indian bipolar people are, I hope I may shed a little light.

My husband is of Indian-Chinese descent, and has bipolar disorder. I am Polish-American and have both bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We are both "first-generation Americans" and both Sikh. We've talked about this issue many times; indeed, I've wondered sometimes how many there are like myself: descendants of Holocaust Survivors, who carry the loathsome sores of Adolf Hitler's hate in the form of mental illness.

Please understand that even in the so-called "progressive" society of North America, mental illness still has a nasty stigma attached to it. Because I take some strong medication, several avenues of employment, including many government jobs, are closed to me. TV ads make it sound almost fashionable to take Prozac or whatever the flavor of the month is, but if you tell someone you're bipolar or OCD, they back away from you like they can catch it like a cold. Look in your newspaper; John Hinckley, who attemped to kill US president Reagan when you were a very young child, is petitioning to be let out of his mental hospital for brief, unsupervised periods, and it's major news. There's a reason this sick man is in the asylum. But he is in a very small minority of mentally ill. The problem is, the world seems to think that everyone who goes to a psychiatrist is a Hinckley waiting to happen, and so it seems we must be belled like lepers to make sure the rest of the "healthy" population gets out of the way.

Mental illness is only now beginning to come into the light and be spoken of. Twenty years ago, the thought of being chronically manic-depressive was nearly unheard of; it was considered a major form of psychosis, and considered rare. A depressed person might get a tranquilizer for a while, lithium if it was prolonged. The experts knew very little about mental illness as it affected the general population. So until the past fifteen or twenty years, mental illness had that stigma. God forbid the soul be sick!

My father-in-law, who is from the Punjab region, tells me that in his youth, mental illness was understood differently. They didn't talk about it in part because of this stigma, but also because of the way families worked. You have the extended family situation in India, and when a person went on a mad streak, he told me, the family ganged up on him and settled him down. It was similar in the Polish working-class culture where my parents grew up, where it was common to have two or three generations to a home; but in the Slavic cultures, mental illness was seen as a flaw of character, and the family stepped in to hide it more than to control it.

There is only so much your therapist can tell you about Indians with bipolar disrder, because of confidentiality laws in most states/provinces. But you can find out how to raise awareness in the public. In the US is the National Institute of Mental Health, and there are many agencies that work to help remove that stigma that prevents people like us from having full lives with all the opportunities that everyone else has. I urge you to find out more, and become an ambassador. Because the real sickness is ignorance, and until that is eradicated
we'll never get anywhere.

Please don't mind my getting on my soapbox, this is just one of those subjects near and dear to me. Best of luck with your therapy, and on your journey.

Blessings,

Elizabeth

<<<<< REPLY >>>>>

Sat Nam! Thank you so much for the heartfelt expression of your own personal experience. This sharing is very healing.

.....G